Death Studies Special Issue Call for Papers
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Guest editors Monika Büscher, Fiorenza Gamba, Alina Coman, Selina Ellis-Gray, Corina Sas and Miriam Schreiter invite submissions for a special issue of the journal on the topic of Futures of Digital Death: Mobilities of Loss and Commemoration.
As our lives and death become increasingly entangled within the digital, a new strand of research has emerged, exploring the opportunities and tensions that technologies can bring within the space of death, dying, and existential concern. A dominant focus has been on exploring and designing technologies supporting death-centric practices around remembrance of loved ones or inheritance of digital artifacts. However, less attention has been paid to how people are actively engaging in curating such data in both the physical and digital space for greater personal value. Ways in which we deal with digital selves, the body and its remains, the memorialization of lost ones, and the spatio-temporal and social context surrounding such practices have shifted the way in which we engage with death, from prescribed and formal to more dynamic, flexible and personally meaningful. This leads to a new range of research questions that require a genuinely interdisciplinary approach.
This special issue focuses on the exploration of these emerging practices. We invite contributions that bring analytical, critical, practice-based and creative insights to the use, design and development of technologies entangled at the end of life. Theoretical, empirical, practical and design or art-based research and approaches are welcome. Themes may include:
- Mobilities of death, loss and commemoration
- The digital economies of death, dying, commemoration and loss
- Dying online or digital mediations of death
- Personalization and hybridization of rituals, digital memorialization, mourning practices
- Digital afterlives, agency and the social presence of the dead
- Digital remains, digital legacy, peri- or post mortem data
- The multiple physical, informational, imaginative mobilities of death, loss and memory
- The multiplying temporalities of practices, memories, experiences
- Methodological considerations, e.g. ethics, privacy, value sensitive design
- Methodological orientation to futures – e.g. use of utopia as method, scenarios, predictions, visions.
Contents
How to Submit
Deadline: Manuscripts must be received by 29 September 2017.
Death Studies requires APA format. Authors may choose to submit either an article up to 20 pages or a note up to 10 pages (double-spaced manuscript pages in Times New Roman, 12-point font, including references).
Please send all manuscripts to: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/udst. Indicate in your cover letter that you would like for your paper to be considered for the special issue. Accepted manuscripts will be available online ahead-of-print.
Timeline for submissions and reviews
First drafts 29 September 2017
First reviews/responses 30 October 2017
Revisions 27 November 2017
Second reviews/responses 12 January 2018
Final papers due 16 February 2018
Queries may be addressed to Miriam Schreiter: miriam.schreiter@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Editorial information
Manuscripts will be double-blind peer reviewed by a group of internal and external reviewers led by the editors:
Monika Büscher, Lancaster University
Fiorenza Gamba, University of Geneva
Alina Coman, Transylvania University
Selina Ellis-Gray, DeadCode
Corina Sas, Lancaster University
Miriam Schreiter, Chemnitz University of Technology
Monika Büscher is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research and Associate Director at the Institute for Social Futures. Her research explores the digital dimension of contemporary ‘mobile lives’ with a focus on IT Ethics. She combines qualitative, ethnographic studies, social theory, and design through mobile, ‘inventive’ methods, and stakeholder engagement.
Alina Coman is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Communication at Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania. Her research is centered in the field of gender and advertising, which resulted in the books Gender Stereotypes in Advertising Discourse (2005) and Communication Techniques (2008). Alina Coman was involved in managing and developing research projects totaling over € 700.000. She also published more than 50 articles and studies in books and scientific journals and has more than 15 years of experience in qualitative research. During the last years, she developed an interest in death studies as well, focusing on the design of grief rituals, life reviews in end of life care and rites of passage.
Guest Editor: Dr Selina Ellis-Gray
Dr Selina Ellis-Gray is a Digital Media Designer and Researcher who engages with themes around data, media, technology use and design within sensitive contexts, such as death, bereavement and loss. She completed her interdisciplinary doctoral studies in August 2015 at the University of Lancaster and is currently part of the DeadCode design collective.
Fiorenza Gamba is affiliate researcher at the Institut de Recherches Sociologiques (IRS) at the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on the sociology and anthropology of contemporary rituals and of memory, urban and mobilities studies, sociology and anthropology of media and body and image. Her last publications include Mémoire et immortalité au temps du numérique (2016, L’Harmattan), Die mediale Inszenierung des berauschten Todes (with S. Cattacin, 2016, SuchtMagazin), and Coping with Loss. Mapping Digital Rituals for Expression of Grief (2016, Health Communication).
Guest Editor: Dr Sas
Dr Sas has expertise in Human Computer Interaction with focus on technologies for wellbeing and health, including personal technologies for self- monitoring, awareness and regulation, user-centred design, user experience, embodied design, and design knowledge. She has been Associate Chair for the top ACM CHI and DIS conferences and served in Programme Committees in over 15 conferences. Her work has received extensive media in written press and radio. She has over 70 peer-reviewed publications, and has been an investigator on grants totalling over £10.5 million.
Miriam Schreiter is a research and teaching assistant at the chair of Intercultural Communication at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Her interests include corporeality and physicality, digital worlds, digital games and qualitative research methods, especially ethnography. She is co-editor of the Springer Handbook Social Practices and Digital Life-Worlds (2016; with Heidrun Friese, Marcus Nolden, Galina Rebane). Miriam is a visiting PhD at Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University. In her PhD project, she analyses representations of death and dying in digital games.
Explore Death Studies
Published by Routledge
10 issues per year
Guest editors Monika Büscher, Fiorenza Gamba, Alina Coman, Selina Ellis-Gray, Corina Sas and Miriam Schreiter invite submissions for a special issue of the journal on the topic of Futures of Digital Death: Mobilities of Loss and Commemoration.
As our lives and death become increasingly entangled within the digital, a new strand of research has emerged, exploring the opportunities and tensions that technologies can bring within the space of death, dying, and existential concern. A dominant focus has been on exploring and designing technologies supporting death-centric practices around remembrance of loved ones or inheritance of digital artifacts. However, less attention has been paid to how people are actively engaging in curating such data in both the physical and digital space for greater personal value. Ways in which we deal with digital selves, the body and its remains, the memorialization of lost ones, and the spatio-temporal and social context surrounding such practices have shifted the way in which we engage with death, from prescribed and formal to more dynamic, flexible and personally meaningful. This leads to a new range of research questions that require a genuinely interdisciplinary approach.
This special issue focuses on the exploration of these emerging practices. We invite contributions that bring analytical, critical, practice-based and creative insights to the use, design and development of technologies entangled at the end of life. Theoretical, empirical, practical and design or art-based research and approaches are welcome. Themes may include:
- Mobilities of death, loss and commemoration
- The digital economies of death, dying, commemoration and loss
- Dying online or digital mediations of death
- Personalization and hybridization of rituals, digital memorialization, mourning practices
- Digital afterlives, agency and the social presence of the dead
- Digital remains, digital legacy, peri- or post mortem data
- The multiple physical, informational, imaginative mobilities of death, loss and memory
- The multiplying temporalities of practices, memories, experiences
- Methodological considerations, e.g. ethics, privacy, value sensitive design
- Methodological orientation to futures - e.g. use of utopia as method, scenarios, predictions, visions.
How to Submit
Deadline: Manuscripts must be received by 29 September 2017.
Death Studies requires APA format. Authors may choose to submit either an article up to 20 pages or a note up to 10 pages (double-spaced manuscript pages in Times New Roman, 12-point font, including references).
Please send all manuscripts to: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/udst. Indicate in your cover letter that you would like for your paper to be considered for the special issue. Accepted manuscripts will be available online ahead-of-print.
Timeline for submissions and reviews
First drafts 29 September 2017
First reviews/responses 30 October 2017
Revisions 27 November 2017
Second reviews/responses 12 January 2018
Final papers due 16 February 2018
Queries may be addressed to Miriam Schreiter: miriam.schreiter@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Editorial information
Manuscripts will be double-blind peer reviewed by a group of internal and external reviewers led by the editors:
Monika Büscher, Lancaster University
Fiorenza Gamba, University of Geneva
Alina Coman, Transylvania University
Selina Ellis-Gray, DeadCode
Corina Sas, Lancaster University
Miriam Schreiter, Chemnitz University of Technology
